


Cigarette Butts

by Becra1



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Anxiety, Depression, Dissociation, Explicit Language, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Harm, Smoking, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-05-03 14:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5295611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Becra1/pseuds/Becra1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave contemplates a few things that have been weighing on his mind, and at thirty stories up, that may not have been his best idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cigarette Butts

Red eyes stare back at you from the dingy mirror that sits in the bathroom of your grimy apartment. Scratches and rust and the fog from the hot (steaming, scorching) shower you just finished prevents you from focusing on anything but the exact center of the mirror that, after 17 years, you are finally able to say you can reach. You don't really know how long you've just been standing here, looking at yourself (was that really you?), trying to ground yourself back in reality again, but judging by the disgusting amount of condensation that's gathered on everything from the heat of the water, it can't have been less than thirty minutes.  


Your eyes zero in on your pupils, watching them dilate and shrink at the efforts of your concentration. (Is that you?) They stare back. (They move the exact same time that you do, that must be you.) Were your eyes always this red?  


Your inner repertoire eventually must have gotten boring enough even for you, as you find your mind wandering to where your brother is and if he's bringing some grub home whenever he decides to come back. There's one hot pocket left in the freezer, but damn if you can't make that last another three days, as long as it means not having to go outside in the noise of day.  


As if on cue, your stomach angrily growls, reminding you of your meager calorie intake today (some apple juice and a snack bag of nacho Doritos). You're broken out of your trance and you take one last look at your face (avoiding anywhere else) before tightening the towel around your waist and steeling your determination for the cold A/C of the hallway (but hey, at least it's working again right? What are you bitching about?). You struggle for a moment, trying to decide between grabbing that last hot pocket and getting dressed before you make for your shitty dinner. You decide, and begin your trek towards your room.  


Heaving through the small strip of actual flooring that you've been able to create despite mountains of smuppets and shitty swords and general crap, you are finally graced with the inside of the promised land, your beloved bedroom. Music plays from your charging phone that was left on earlier, some sort of indie garbage resonating from the speakers. Your shades sit safely sheltered from the mess of your room on top of your slightly-less-messy-bed, where you decide to take refuge as well. You doesn't see any reason to rush yourself with getting dressed (if one could call basketball shorts and an ironic hoodie dressed), and there's nothing to hide yet anyway. As unpredictable as Bro is, you've clocked the man's erratic schedule down to a tee: if he comes home at all, it will probably be between the hours of 12PM to 5AM. Otherwise, you are home free, living the dream, all alone in a sweet (small and unkempt) bachelor pad. Oh yeah, you're straight up fightin the ladies off. So fuck it. You're going to lay around in nothing but a towel for at least another two hours.  


You kinda do wish that your bro would come home though. If for nothing else than to bring some sustenance that's not necessarily made in a microwave. You understand. He's out a lot, and it used to be to make some money to bring home and raise your freckled ass, but now that you're 'grown', who knows when you'll see him. It used to be for a reason that bro was gone all the time, and you're sure that it still is (you try to argue with yourself, as you've done an innumerable amount of times before), but it's so much different now. You feel like... You don't know. Feelings and bullshit, come on Strider, put on your grown-up panties. He's not around because he doesn't want to be, not because he can't be, and that's fine, whatever. Let him live his life. Without you.  


You guess it kinda breaks your heart, but you'll never admit that, especially to yourself. That would not be cool at all.  


You play with the corner of your towel as you think. Your hair is just on the verge of being acceptably dry and dreamy, so you guess it's about time to quit being lazy and naked and put on some damn clothing. You let the towel fall as you walk to your dresser and throw on some shorts. Shower-time is officially finished. Now bro can't say that you didn't do shit today, because you have your clean-ass ass to prove him wrong.  


An innocent hoodie lies on the ground, some shitty football team you've never actually seen or cared about adorning the front of it. It doesn't smell too bad, so you suppose it's better than your bare nipples scandalously parading about the house, and you shrug it on. You nab your secret (so precious, so secret) pack of cigarettes and a lighter from an inconspicuous shoebox on the edge of the mess you call your room, and you open your bedroom window, leaning on the frame. So high up. Miles and miles, it seemed like, but that's ridiculous, so maybe thirty stories is more accurate.

_Can you imagine what falling all that way would feel like?_

The thought startles you. What the hell? Where did that come from?  


Did it really have to occur to you every time you looked out?  


You light up a cig to get the thought out of your mind. Don't worry about it, you'll deal with that later. You take a drag. Damn that shit burns. Damn it's nice.  


Your other hand busies itself by absentmindedly tracing the familiar raised and jagged skin of your side, as it's done so many times before. It's everywhere really, but you can only hit up your thighs and the inside of your arms enough before the scars start to look real, real nasty (but so, so good, shit you wish you could make more). And someone notices, but that can't ever happen with you. You flinch from even the thought. Bro would kick your ass into the pavement if he knew about your little habit, he would fucking murder you. Throw out every name in the book, assumably citing page 347, line 56, "disrespectful" more than anything else. That's his favorite, you think. Well, nothing like your trusty pocket knife you guess, courtesy of the same asshole brother who seems to think that a secondhand pocketknife is a good idea for a teenager as a last-minute birthday gift. Whatever, at least you're really getting his money's worth out of it.  


You feel one particularly recent scar on your hip that was a little deeper than you intended it to be. Still healing up fine, but you can feel the sides of it where it was once connected, smooth skin. You laugh a little, guess you really gotta start paying attention to which blade you're using, one can do a lot more damage than another. But honestly, you're not sure you even care. You love that scar. It's proof that you can take punishment, atone for it. It's a light-membraned echo of the thought _look what I can do,_ and in the same breath, _look what you did to me_. Like a badge of honor, you wish you could fucking parade it around to your friends and in bro's face like some sort of fucked up rite of passage into 'hey guys I'm fucked up and here's proof' -hood.  


You don't know. You just keep running your fingers across its admittedly impressive length. 7 inches of fuckery. Haha. Insert dick joke in this, a time of emotional reflection. Whatever.  


Another successful drag from your cigarette fills your lungs, and you breathe out white smoke. You haven't been able to light one up for a while, you think. Finally, you caught a break.  


You close your eyes and lean your head against the window, continuing to take deep drags as your music plays in the background. Ironically, the introductory strumming of Sweater Weather meets your ears, and the contrast between the song and the hell-heat of the night make you laugh humorlessly to yourself. Your eyes wander down to the ground far below you again, and you're surprised that there isn't as many people as usual out tonight. 

_No one would see your body hit the ground._  
_No one else would be hurt. No one could stop you._  
_It's so close. Just a step away._

Wait, what?  


No, no. Shut up, fuckin disembodied piece of shit voice. Deep breaths. You looked this shit up, the internet called it "intrusive thinking". That's not what you really want. You try to remind yourself of this as your eyes stay glued to the sidewalk and you try to calm back down.

_Your bro would have to come home then. If nothing else than to pay for them to scrape you off the street. He can't ignore you then._

That's stupid. Bro pays attention to you. Last week he brought you Chinese food. How much more could you ask for? 

_He would see all your scars._  
_All your pain out there in the open and he can't even yell at you for it. He has to see what he's done._  
_Hurt his reputation as much and as thoroughly as he hurt you._  
_Go on, no one will miss you._  
_He doesn't care enough about you to be sad, but then everyone will know he could have prevented this._  
_No one cares._  
_One little jump and you're free._  
_Make him pay. Make him pay._

Your body is leaning too far out of the window for comfort, but you can't find it in yourself to care. This is stupid, he doesn't care. He never did, as long as you brought home good grades and got minimally better at strifing and stayed as quiet as a Strider should be, why would he care? You're nothing. You're nothing and worthless and not good enough for your brother to even want to come home to see you. You never were. He just yells to make you better. Yells and demands that you are better, because that's all you are allowed to be. That's what you deserve. Anything less is a beating into the roof where you both pretend you have a chance. He's a good brother. He doesn't deserve this.  


But something in your head tells you he does. Something in your head tells you to make him pay. Make him pay. _Make him pay._  


You have both knees on the window sill. 

_No more secrets. Make him pay._

You can feel the wind on your face. Your torso inches forward. You breathe very deeply, your stomach tensing up beyond belief and your fingers subconsciously grasping the windowsill enough to leave marks. Your feel you hair blow in the wind and you lean forward so, so slightly more.

_Make him pa-_

The front door slams shut. You hear the weight of bro's DJ-ing equipment bag hit the floor as he bellows out "MEXICAN FOOD, COME GET IT."  


Your breath is caught in your throat, and you're suddenly acutely aware of your precarious balance keeping you just on the brink of falling hundreds of feet to your splatting death. You scramble to get yourself inside, losing grip of the cigarette you forgot you had been holding, which wasted down enough to create a burn mark that singed the inside of your first two fingers. The nub falls through the air, down, down far enough that you can no longer make it out against the backdrop of the ground. It's lost to the emptiness of the night.

_Just like you would have been._

You struggle to get solid footing on the floor, one hand gripping the front of your shitty jacket and the other entangled in your hair, both hands' maintaining a grip that you haven't realized is far too hard. You take a few unsure steps backwards towards your bed, slowly sitting and then laying down onto your side once your thighs hit the mattress. Your bed lies in the corner farthest away from the door, your body slowly curling away from the threshold. Your mind is still in the window, thirty stories up, in what you have yet to comprehend as mild shock, as you take slow breaths.  
Suddenly it all hits you.

_Was I really about to jump?_

Your body curls in towards itself, convulsions accompanied by sobs you didn't know were happening, tearing through your being. Your face is wet with tears, and as tight as you hold your head with both hands, it is still spinning.  


_I shouldn't be alive. I shouldn't be alive. I should be dead. My body should be splattered on the asphalt. I shouldn't be here._  


Your breathing is coming in shallow pants, panic overtaking the shock of your reality. What were you thinking? What the hell?  
_Quit freaking out. Quit freaking out. Quit freaking out!  
_

You hear the knob of your door turn and you feel the entire world stop. Your body and brain both come to a screeching halt. Your Bro's voice immediately booms through the previous silence of your room.  


"Hey you little ingrate, didn't you hear me? I said Mexican food. Come show some fuckin' respect and eat."  


It's the most he's said to you in a month. You almost began to miss his voice. Almost.  


You are facing completely away from him, the light of your phone apparently giving him the impression that you were ignoring him. Not for the first time, you thank all of the gods and spirits in the world for you and your brother's fucked up 'say the least as is physically necessary in the most ironic way' relationship, as you hold up your hand in a familiar thumbs-up and say, "Had a hot pocket, Bro. I'm stuffed like a turkey's ass on thanksgiving. Thanks though." You are surprised at the sureness of your own voice, considering your heart feels like it's about to implode.  


He doesn't make any noise but you can tell he’s pissed. "So you mean to tell me after all the fuckin' bitchin' you been doin' about there never bein' nothin to eat, yer too full for dinner? That sounds like some real fuckin' bullshit, Dave. Whatever, kid, enjoy your cold ass burritos. I got fuckin' shit to do." He stops, and you can tell he's waiting for a response. Nothing comes to mind.  


"Sorry."  


"'Sorry?’" Oh, you guess that was the wrong thing to say. "What the fuck ever, Dave. Also, glad to see you haven't done a goddamn thing today, again." The last word comes forth from clenched teeth. He's really pissed this time. You don't have the heart to point out the shower you took, but you feel as though he wouldn't care anyway. "I hope I see some fuckin' shit done around here when I get back." He finished and slams your door. You hear him mumbling as he walks away, barely catching "...lazy fuckin’ shit...disrespectful...useless ass...", but you are glad not to hear the rest. You hear the front door slam as well, signaling his departure.  


He could be back anywhere from a couple hours from now to a few days, but you guess you'll just have to wait to find that out. You briefly wonder about disobeying just to be an ass, but you quickly discard the idea in favor of savoring your body's health by not getting the shit beat out of you.  


You remain laying down, finding your body useless to move. Your composure, you think, is hanging on by a string. You see a spot form below you on the mattress, quickly followed by another, and another. You feel the tears running down your face, but not the sadness in your mind to accompany them. Just... nothing. You don't feel anything right now, and you don't know if that's bad or good, but to you, it's good. It's better than the alternative, at least.  


You lay there, on your side, facing away from your door, and the thought flits through your mind that the breeze on your face actually felt quite nice. You lay there for a while. Not happy, not sad, just tears sliding off the bridge of your nose and onto the cloth beneath you. You're going to stay here for a while, because right now, after today, you think it is all you have in yourself to do. Lie here, and blank out, and prevent yourself from thinking about the breeze on your face. You can only simply force yourself to exist.  


(As much as you wish you didn’t.)  


You don't remember how long you're there, but something in your mind pulls up the echo of your brother's threat to conscience. You are on your feet, but your hands are kind of shaking and you don't remember expending the energy to stand up. _Whatever. Worry about that later._  


Before you begin "getting shit done" (which you think is supposed to mean general cleaning, which you would of liked to of pointed out, you have been doing), you suppose you minus well light up another cig. You go to your window, backing up a little ways this time to prevent looking out beyond what you absolutely have to, and getting any more ideas. The cigarette slowly burns out and you look at it in stupid empathy.  


You stand there, at your windowsill for the second time that night, holding on to the remaining inch of your cigarette. One day, you think. One day, you think you're gonna burn out until you're nothing but a cigarette butt.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first work on ao3 (and kind of a vent fic), so i hope you enjoyed it. If it needs additional tags, please let me know. thanks for reading<3


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